Firsthand Account

Addiction is Everywhere

I used to think that I was in an unusual situation. I grew up surrounded by addiction. My father was an addict, my step-father is an addict. My mother is an addict (of a different kind). I’m an addict. My grandmother is an addict. My grandfather was an addict. This charity is in my brother’s name because he was an addict. The list just goes on and on.

I have a lot of addiction in my life, but over time I’ve realized that pretty much everyone has some addiction in their life. Everyone has a sibling, parent, cousin, aunt or uncle–often more than one–that suffers from addiction. Whenever addiction gets discussed, I have learned to be silent and listen. Why? Because believe it or not, I’m not the most knowledgeable about the topic. For as much as I’ve experienced, many others have been much closer to it than me. I will want to talk about my brother, but someone else lost a son/daughter to addiction. I’ll want to talk about my father, but someone else in the room is still estranged from family because of their personal addiction. I’ll want to comment about my past diving into a bottle, but someone else is still fighting to not pick up a needle every day.

The truth is that addiction is in all of us. In fact, we know so much about addiction that we have a name for it now:

Dopamine

The chemical process in our brain that is associated with addiction is the release of dopamine. You probably know this term because dopamine is the chemical that every single social media platform is trying to trigger in you every moment of every day. For this reason, millions of people are currently fighting addiction to social media. It sounds so trivial right? In the face of heroin or cocaine addiction, social media addiction seems small, but it’s not really any different. Look at it this way: LSD triggers certain changes in the brain that differ substantially, but those effects are followed by the exact same flow of dopamine that one gets from any other addictive action: sex, winning, completing a task, video games, social media, clicker apps on your phone, gambling, or whatever it is.

Dopamine is an important chemical. It is there to encourage you. When you do something that takes a while (say, doing the dishes) all the way to the finish, your brain releases dopamine like giving you a pat on the back. “Good Job!” it says, like a proud parent, and next time you go to do the same task, your body remembers and encourages you to do it to get that chemical release again. The purpose of this is to encourage you to do long-term difficult tasks that will ultimately benefit you. These tasks have been important to humanity for a long time before we were making our beds in the morning. It’s easy to understand the necessity of being willing to spend weeks hunting down an animal for food while starving in our hunter-gatherer days.

Addiction isn’t laziness

Hopefully, like me, you can eat a bit of humble pie via the previous text and admit that even you are prone to addictions. But maybe you have the willpower to put your phone down. Or maybe not your phone, but you’ve certainly been able to resist those “hard drugs”, right? Well, it turns out that, like with any chemical, everyone is different. Some people are more sensitive to dopamine than others. Sometimes the reason is genetic. Sometimes it’s environmental. Sometimes it’s the sensitivity to the drug (or other addiction) that triggers a higher dopamine output than in others. There are many examples of how it can happen, but when your best friend is tumbling into an addiction, and you were able to resist, it’s not as simple as telling him/her to tough it out, not be a wuss, or whatever. It’s different for them than it is for you (in the moment). We have to acknowledge that those people in the spiral don’t need a voice telling them they’re pathetic. They need a hand reaching down to where they are to offer them a way out.

There’s a lot to change

The start of an addiction is explained above, but it’s more complicated when you’re suffering from addiction for months, years, or decades. Eventually, your live is inexorably tied to your addiction. All your friends are involved with your addiction. Your family may have given up on helping you–or even be part of the problem. Your daily routine includes your addiction. Your budget revolves around your addiction. Where you work probably revolves around your addiction. Your life is what you make of it, and if your goal is feeding the addiction, then your life will be designed to feed that addiction.

By the time an addict gets that far down the rabbit hole, there are broken relationships that need to be mended to get healthy. There may be permanent chemical imbalances that must be medicated. There is almost never a way that one can fully recover without lengthy therapy. And each of those things are big complicated messes that could themselves take decades of work–and there’s the contradiction. The addiction has been the addict’s source of dopamine for a long time. It’s an easy way to get dopamine, certainly easier than apologizing to family for decades. Their body has been trained that the “right” thing to do is to go to their trigger. They literally have to retrain their own mind, their own body, and their own heart to seek dopamine through constructive means. Hopefully that explains why so many addicts fall off the wagon.

A checklist?

I don’t have a checklist for solving addiction myself. I’m not an expert, I’ve just done a lot of reading. But there are checklists out there. The short answer is always a 12-step program, but let’s go a little deeper here.

Mike Rowe talked about a particular addiction therapy. I highly recommend Mr Rowe’s video if you’re currently fighting an addiction of yours or of a family member. However, I bring up the video for a different reason. What is discussed in this video is the reason we support Wilderness Therapy at Harlan Serenity Foundation. So, in addition to the 12 steps, I’m going to summarize here:

1. Community
2. Self-Esteem
3. Self-Actualization
4. Healthy Coping Mechanisms
5. Healthy Habits
6. Safe Space

Community

When all your life revolves around your addiction, you need new friends. You need a community that is willing to support you as you try to rewire your brain. You need a friends that don’t spend all day talking about their next hit. You need a community that will love you when you fail, and be there to help you pick up the pieces. Community is absolutely crucial to fighting addiction.

Self-Esteem

What would your reaction be, the 50th time your child came home drugged out of his/her mind after promising they would quit? Anger? Disappointment? Disillusionment? Would you just be done caring? And that would be your kid.

Addicts are still humans with feelings. They know what they’re doing is wrong, and they know how it makes others feel. But they also know that everyone just sees them as the addict. Most of them have abandoned all respect for themselves. That’s why many of them turn to crime. What does society care if they do something wrong? It’s what’s expected. Many people just want them dead.

Addicts need to know that they have value. I went to a christian camp recently and sat with some young boys and talked to them about what it means to grow up and become a man. The second day of sitting in a tight room filled with worship music I could tell that the 8-year-old boy just wanted to go outside, so I tried to engage his brain.

“Do you know why everyone here is spending so much time praying?” I asked.

“Because God?” He said, looking confused.

“Because you’re important.” I said. “We care so much about you that we’re spending the time here for you.”

Addicts may be flawed. Addicts may have done horrible things. Addicts may have betrayed everyone that loved them. But addicts are valuable human beings, just like you and me (and remember you’re humble pie, you’re a bit of an addict yourself).

Self-Actualization

Being told you’re valuable is one thing, but proving it to yourself is something else entirely. Addicts need to see for themselves that they’re not completely broken. They need to put something together with their own hands that has value. Whether that’s completing a workout, building a birdhouse, cleaning a house, or–where many of them find the best strength–helping other addicts recover.

Addiction isn’t going to even be escapable for someone who doesn’t believe they can do anything for themselves. If I tell my toddler to go potty, and she responds with “I can’t!”. I don’t leave it there. I can’t let her believe that she is incapable of doing things for herself. There’s too much at stake in her life to let her believe that. The addict is in the exact same place. They have to find strength in themselves that they don’t even believe they have.

Healthy Coping Mechanism

As we discussed, the dopamine trigger is still there, and will likely be there forever. Addiction is a dirty trick that rewires our brains and doesn’t really let us escape completely. This means that the addict needs something to do when they’re feeling the urge. Just like with anger, sadness, or any other emotion, the “I need dopamine” emotion needs to be acknowledged and handled in a healthy way. If we take away the drugs, but don’t give the addict some mechanism to handle the desire, all we’re doing is making them willing to work harder to get the drugs. This is a deeply inbuilt survival mechanism, after all.

The coping mechanism needs to trigger dopamine. This is why, in Mike Rowe’s example, working out is a really effective coping mechanism. Exercise is a high-dopamine activity. And it’s much healthier than scrolling Tik-Tok.

It also helps if the coping mechanism helps with self-actualization. Exercise is great here too. You might be able to see how we can see wilderness therapy as even better. Self-actualization in the form: I survived out in the woods by myself. Exercise and fresh-air to trigger dopamine. Groups of people together to create community. It all lines up.

Healthy Habits

Having a coping mechanism is great. But if your entire life is built around your addiction, you need to change your day-to-day habits. This means that you need a set of new habits for your life that don’t revolve around your addiction. Habits take months, or even years to take hold and override existing built-in habits. This is often the hardest part of the journey. Discovering ways to live that don’t constantly remind you of your addiction, while at the same time, not falling back into the addiction is a tricky and narrow road to walk.

Safe Space

As we mentioned under self-esteem, there’s a lot of shame tied to addiction. The addiction itself is often shameful, let alone the things the addict did to feed the addiction. Their community needs to include a space where they can be honest about their past without judgement. This is usually some form of therapy, but this is also the reason that 12 step programs are anonymous. Church small groups are also a good option here.

Conclusion

Ultimately, addiction is a complicated mess, and escaping addiction is a lifelong process that involves a lot of work. I hope this information (garnered over years of living surrounded by addiction and 12-step programs) has helped you better understand addiction and how to fight it. I’ll be praying for you.